Archives - Music: Page 7
Author: paul carson (Tue Apr 17, 2007 4:26 pm)
Title: Keith Richards
By HAROLD SCHECHTER
KEITH RICHARDS, the hard-living guitarist for the Rolling Stones, recently claimed — in jest, he now says — that, after the death of his father in 2002, he mixed some of the old man’s ashes with cocaine and snorted them. While the tabloid press was quick to milk this revelation for every last bit of shock value, ingesting a dead family member isn’t quite as depraved as it seems. After all, “funerary cannibalism,” as anthropologists call it, has existed in different parts of the world since prehistoric times.
As recently as the 1950s, a New Guinea tribe called the Fore engaged in the ritual consumption of dead relatives. The practice led to an epidemic of kuru, or “shaking death,” a mad-cow-like neurodegenerative disease caused by eating human brains.
The mourning customs of another group of New Guinea aborigines, the Gimi, also involved funerary cannibalism. According to Dr. Kenneth Iserson, the author of the encyclopedic “Death to Dust: What Happens to Dead Bodies?,” “In the Gimi ritual, relatives placed a dead man’s body on a platform, so that he could decompose. ... His female relatives then dragged him off the scaffold, dismembered the corpse, and carried the pieces into the normally forbidden men’s hut. There they ate their portions over several days.”
The ritual has also been observed among the Yanomamo tribe of the Amazon. When a Yanomamo child died, the parents held a funeral feast during which they consumed the little one’s entire body, including the bones, which were ground up, cooked and mixed with plantain.
Shocking as it seems to modern sensibilities, the custom of funerary cannibalism springs from a profound and very human impulse: the desire to incorporate the essence of a loved one into your own body. In that sense, it is simply a literal enactment of a conception that most of us share: the belief that, when someone close to us dies, the person lives on inside us — that he or she becomes an undying part of our own deepest selves.
If Keith Richards was, in fact, telling the truth (and it says something about his wild-man reputation that his claim seemed perfectly credible), it’s possible that he was simply experimenting with one of the few substances he hadn’t yet tried. But maybe — without even consciously realizing it — he was performing a rock ’n’ roll version of a primordial ritual of mourning.
Harold Schechter, a professor of English at Queens College, is the author of the forthcoming book “The Devil’s Gentleman: Privilege, Power, and the Trial that Ushered in the Twentieth Century.”
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grow and be kind